


you pms like a bitch, i would know

by goodbyechunkylemonmilk



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, F/F, Rule 63, Suicidal Thoughts, Twitter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 17:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10540839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbyechunkylemonmilk/pseuds/goodbyechunkylemonmilk
Summary: Being James Potter's best friend means Sirius is pretty much contractually bound to have a Facebook, a Twitter, and a Pinterest she never finished setting up. It's kind of a pain, but she can at least see the benefits of Twitter as a substitute for the near-constant urge to scream at the top of her lungs.[Basically: what if Sirius didn't know you can get people's tweets texted to you, and also they were girls?]





	

**Author's Note:**

> There are some brief and relatively vague references to Sirius having suicidal thoughts.
> 
> I didn't change Sirius and Regulus' names because there aren't parallels that fit neatly enough to be clear while also matching their family's naming schemes. James _is_ actually named Jamie but goes by James for the sake of consistency and also because I think she would. 
> 
> Shoutout to AO3 user nettlewine for the concept, several of the tweets that I just fully stole from her, and for doing a massive amount of legwork to come up with Sirius' Twitter handle that I obnoxiously didn't even use.

Sirius only ever tweets when she’s sad, or drunk, or drunk and sad, the last of which is her frame of mind as she lies starfished across James’ bed after what started as a fun night, their end-of-semester ritual of stealing from the Potters’ liquor cabinet, watching whatever action movie James has currently designated An Instant Classic™, and making cruel comments about their school nemeses. Tonight, Sirius said that Lily Evans’ freckles made her look diseased, to which James responded that Lily was actually one of the prettiest girls in their grade, so, naturally, Sirius proceeded to get unbelievably, disgustingly drunk.

Sirius overdoing it isn’t exactly new, but this time, James put a hand on Sirius’ arm and said, very soft, “Don’t you think you ought to slow down?” Her lower lip wobbled and her eyes widened and the uncharacteristic hesitance made Sirius feel like they were on the edge of something she’d been avoiding for a very long time. She smacked James’ hand away and said that if she wanted to drink with someone who was going to make her miserable, she could just go home and do shots outside her mother’s study. Then, while James was in the bathroom, she chugged both of their drinks and pretended to fall asleep spread across the entire bed so that James would have to take the couch.

This, she realizes now, was a miscalculation, because James’ couch is the size of a small island nation, outfitted with dozens of pillows, and all the way across the room from where Sirius is lying, lonely and out of liquor. Besides which, she had to lie totally still until James gave up poking and prodding her with a force that has undoubtedly left bruises. James would call this her “aristocratic pretensions,” as if the Potters aren’t exactly as rich as the Blacks, if not a little richer considering that unstable people more often than not make poor investment decisions. There was an absolutely miserable week, back in middle school, when James referred to Sirius exclusively as “Princess,” as in “The Princess and the Pea,” because she bruised fast and complained even faster. Sirius felt like she was having a heart attack every time, but she couldn’t just say that, not without explaining why, which was something she was still working on sorting out for herself. She said instead that people already thought James was in love with her, _not that there was anything wrong with that_ , syrupy and overly-earnest. James stopped, but she didn’t so much as touch Sirius’ arm for two months, which made it a sort of hollow victory.

James uses Twitter like her phone is a bomb grafted to her hand that’s going to go off if she doesn’t immediately let her twenty-seven followers know what she thinks of the TV show she’s watching, the one-eyed squirrel in the park, or how frustrating being stuck in traffic is. The only upside is that occasionally, when Sirius has said something particularly witty, James holds up a hand so that she can transcribe it exactly without being distracted, and then sends it out, making their friendship a matter of public record. If Sirius could, without having to concede her already tenuous claim on normalcy, she would have those tweets printed on a shirt or a sandwich board and she would wear it everywhere.

Sirius has very little use for Twitter during the day. When it’s light out and she wants to yell, she can find Peter, or go to the café that always gets her order wrong. If she’s feeling particularly angry without the impotence that sometimes comes along for the ride, she can get into it with her mother. But even she can concede that calling the house phone at two in the morning to yell that her upbringing ruined her is a little unreasonable, even if it is completely accurate. That’s when Twitter comes in handy. Her account is private, her only followers James and Regulus (who has long since forgotten her password and deactivated the email that would allow her to recover it). James is diligent about getting a solid eight hours of sleep every night, which means Sirius can say whatever she wants and delete it all once she’s calmed down.

She squints at her phone until the screen holds more or less steady and starts tweeting. James’ phone, pressed between her face and an uncomfortable-looking throw pillow, lights up and plays a snippet of a Katy Perry song Sirius can’t identify. James, while not popular by any means, is in several Facebook group chats, one for each team she’s on, so that’s been happening with some frequency all night.

Sirius sends an out-of-focus photo of the ceiling with a maudlin, misspelled caption about not truly belonging anywhere, four-hundred-and-twenty gun emoji split between three messages, and a picture of her phone screen on the dictionary definition of “unrequited.”  James’ phone rings three more times in rapid succession, and the realization sinks in, a little slower than it should.

Sirius has gotten very good at talking herself down while pretending to be soothed by James petting her arm and murmuring over and over that everything’s going to be all right. She knows all about breathing in for four beats and out for seven, and focusing on an image that calms her down, and all the other self-help bullshit James prints out and slips through the slats of her locker. Left to her own devices, she’s inclined to just ride it out, letting the anger or anxiety (or both, as the case may be) wash over her. If no one’s watching, she doesn’t have to worry about making her crazy seem like the manageable kind someone could fall in love with, and not something she’s just barely keeping a leash on at the best of times.

Once she can steady her hands again, she walks over to the couch, not bothering to be quiet because James sleeps like the dead when she’s drunk, and on the off chance that she does wake up, Sirius is more than ready for a fight. She yanks the phone free, knocking James’ head sideways on her pillow in the process.

James doesn’t lock her phone, obviously, because she trusts the universe to look out for her in the way only someone with a happy childhood can. Sirius swipes her animated screensaver aside and pulls down the notification menu to see a stream of her tweets sent right to James’ inbox. The archive goes back months, full of her worst moments, most barely-remembered.

She jams her foot into James’ ribs and wishes half-heartedly that she were still wearing her steel-toed boots. “Wake the fuck up.”

James blinks up at her, smiling because happiness is, improbably, her natural state, before it must occur to her that Sirius wouldn’t wake her up for no reason. Her grin falls and she pushes herself upright. “What’s wrong? Do you want to talk?” She pats the cushion next to her just as Sirius shoves her phone in her face. Between her glasses settled on her nightstand and a night of drinking not quite slept-off, she struggles to force her eyes to focus, but Sirius sees the exact moment when she understands what she’s looking at. “Oh.”

“So this whole time.” Sirius’ voice trembles and she takes a breath, but that only seems to make whatever’s shaking apart in her chest even worse. “This whole time you’ve been getting these and what—laughing?”

“You know I would never do that.” James stands up and reaches for Sirius’ arm, which Sirius yanks back reflexively. “Look, you’re drunk, you’re upset. I get that. I just thought. I set the texts up automatically and forgot about it, because you don’t tweet. And then I got the first few, and you get so _distant_ when you’re having a hard time and you don’t let me in and I _worry_. I know I should have said something, but I was just trying to look out for you.”

“That’s _worse_. Do you understand that? Do you get how patronizing that is? You don’t get to decide for me! You knew I wouldn’t have told you and that didn’t matter to you. What I wanted didn’t _matter_ to you.” The worst part isn’t what she said, but what she _could_ have said. It’s humiliating, for sure, to know that she’s been wasting time doing her best Normal Person impression while James was getting proof of how messed up she is sent straight to her phone. But what she really can’t take, what makes her feel like curling up in a ball and never, ever moving again, is how close she’s gotten to detailing how hard it is to be in love with her best friend. She’s typed and deleted so many tweets about James’ eyes, her stupid sticking-up hair, and the soft, indulgent smile Sirius has never seen leveled at anyone but her.  She has been, without knowing it, on the precipice of ruining everything, and the only thing that stopped her was the inability to express exactly how stupidly far gone she is.

She has to call Regulus eight times before she gets an answer. She counts the rings instead of listening to James’ frantic apologies mixed with justifications, wishing that putting her hands over her ears didn’t seem so totally juvenile.

“What is it?” Regulus asks, voice muffled by what must be her pillow. “You’re supposed to be Potter’s problem right now.”

“You need to drive here and pick me up. Right now.”

“I’m sorry you and your _girlfriend_ are having a fight, but I’m not going to—”

“Right now,” she repeats, her tone lilting toward hysteria. “Right this fucking second or I am going to walk home drunk, in the dark, across the city and when I get murdered it’s going to be your fault. Do you want my blood on your hands? Pick. Me. Up.”

“Sirius,” James says in what is clearly meant to be her soothing voice, which Sirius has never had the heart to tell her lands somewhere between condescending and gratingly obsequious. “Why don’t you let Regulus get back to sleep and we can talk about this? If you really can’t stay, I could wake up my dad and—”

“Don’t wake up your dad!” she shrieks, the words grating in her throat. “Just. It’s fine. Reg is going to sneak into the kitchen and take the car keys and she’s going to pick me up. I can’t talk to your dad right now, James, I really can’t. If you come any closer to me, I’m going to hit you. Just don’t fucking— Don’t, okay?”

“Okaaay,” Regulus says, sounding awake for the first time since she picked up. “I want to help but, in case you’ve forgotten, _I only have my permit._ I cannot legally drive anywhere, especially not alone in the middle of the night.”

“Just drive slow. And if you see any cash when you take the keys from Mom’s purse, grab it in case you need to bribe someone.”

“You’re being crazy. Do you get that?” It hurts less, somehow, that Regulus knows, because she can understand what it’s like. Sirius loves James, dearly, desperately, but there is a chasm between them that will not, that _cannot_ , ever close. If James woke her father right now and said that Sirius needed a ride home, he would wrinkle his nose at the smell of liquor that must be wafting off of them, but he would usher them into his car without complaint, and if he had any questions, he would wait until Sirius was gone to ask them. They come from different worlds, and she’s been stupid to continue pretending otherwise.

Sirius turns away from James and lowers her voice, as if there is anything left to salvage. “I do. Please come pick me up anyway. I’m not kidding, and I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need it. Please just. I can’t be here right now.”

Regulus takes an hour, an hour of Sirius shivering on James’ front step, her back pressed against the door to keep James from joining her outside. She pulls into the driveway at a crawl, hunched and squinting over the dashboard like an old woman. Sirius tugs the door open while the car’s still moving and throws herself into the passenger’s seat, barking as she does, “Get me the fuck out of here.” It would be a pretty smooth exit except that Regulus comes to a complete stop and refuses to move until Sirius has her seatbelt on, and then executes a twenty-three-point turn to get out of the Potters’ driveway.

Once they’re safely on the road, Sirius says, staring at her phone lit up with texts from James, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Regulus doesn’t take her eyes off the road. “I didn’t fucking ask.”

 

 

 

Sirius isn’t interested in gym class at the best of times, and she _certainly_ isn’t in the mood to watch James swan around like being able to catch a ball makes her some big hero. She kills time on her phone in the locker room and tries to remember when she last claimed cramps to get out of running laps. Just when she thinks she’s pushing her luck, she sees James’ familiarly garish high-tops land on the floor of a stall she’d thought was empty. There’s no point trying to leave when James knows exactly where she’ll be, so she waits, stares down at her phone and tries to exude boredom and a general air of _over it all._

James walks over, light on the balls of her feet as if there’s any chance she hasn’t yet been discovered, and Sirius waits until there’s no escaping it to say, “Really? You’re ambushing me now?”

“I just want to talk. You’ve been avoiding me.”

“No _shit_ I’ve been avoiding you. I’d like to keep avoiding you right now, if you wouldn’t mind getting out of my way.” She doesn’t actually move, knowing that she’s been lucky to escape confrontation this long, though if she could she’d just as soon leave the country.

“I’ve been thinking about what happened at my house. Kind of ruined Christmas break, if I’m being honest. But the point is, I get it now. I understand why you’re upset, and I know how to fix it. Will you hear me out? Please?”

Sirius tries to swallow past the lump in her throat. “Fine. What do you want?”

“Can you sit down? You know I hate when you loom over me like that.”

“I’d rather stand.” All Sirius has going for her, really, is a mortification she’s had a fair amount of success sublimating into rage, and a good six inches of height.

“Fine. Fine. Look, do you remember when you tweeted that you couldn’t take it anymore, and you were just so tired? And I called you and said I couldn’t sleep and we talked for hours?”

“God.” Sirius feels herself going red. “What’s your point? So I was stupid not to figure it out earlier, I get it.”

“That is _so far_ from my point.” James reaches for her arm but pulls back at the last minute. “What I mean to say is, the thought of losing you scares the shit out of me. I really couldn’t take it. I was fucking terrified, Sirius, the whole time we were on the phone. You were so out of it, and I didn’t know if anything I was saying was getting through to you. I didn’t mean to lie; I just wanted to find the best way to bring it up and then. Well, you know what happened. And I understand that it makes you feel vulnerable, so I’ve been trying to think of something that would even the playing field. And I know that I’m not. I mean that I don’t have. Well, we haven’t had the same experiences, exactly. So I can’t make up for it, but I do have one thing.” James takes a breath. “One thing that ­if I had it my way, I’d rather keep to myself.

“Not that I’m in a huge rush to go downstairs and have balls chucked at my head or whatever Neanderthal bullshit we’re engaging in today, but could you get on with it, please?”

“Right. I’m sorry. I’m just uncomfortable.”

“Now you know how I feel.”

“Right. Right. I just don’t want you to think I expect anything of you, and it’s probably going to make you feel weird and I’m sorry about that. It doesn’t seem fair but I have to do _something_. This can’t be where we end.” James’ voice cracks and Sirius puts her phone down, finally. It was a pointless charade; they both know that she doesn’t have anyone to text with such a fervent passion who isn’t right in front of her, but still, without the shield she feels the full weight of her vulnerability come crashing down. “So I’m just. God, this is hard. Maybe I could like. Tweet it and then you could read that, right?” James tugs a hand through her hair and forces a laugh.

“I deleted the app.”

“Right. No, that makes sense. I just. What I’m trying to say is, okay, I don’t have like. Issues with my parents like you do and I don’t have. I mean it’s not the same for me; there isn’t anything that I’d be scared to tell you except this one thing, right, and I guess I should have gotten it because I’ve been hiding this from you for. God, years, I guess. And it would have killed me if you found out by accident so I’m _sorry,_ I really am. I was thinking about myself and I didn’t want to not have that. That insight into what was going on with you because if something happened I just couldn’t. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t fair and I get that. What I’m trying to say, or what I’m trying really hard not to say, I guess, like I’m thinking you’re going to stop me and say that’s enough.” She pauses, a little hopeful, but even if Sirius wanted to stop her, she can’t seem to bring herself to speak. She’s always been the vulnerable one, embarrassingly so, and there’s something earth-shifting about seeing James red-faced and fidgety. James nods a few times in rapid succession and gulps. “Fair enough. Okay. What I’m saying is that for a few years now, I’ve had this like, huge, monstrous, embarrassing crush on you, and I’ve been trying really hard to keep it from affecting our friendship. I know it’ll be a little weird for a while now, but I’ll get over it and we’ll be fine, okay? We have to be fine.”

Sirius takes a deep breath, and then another when the first doesn’t do the trick. “Are you fucking with me right now?”

James flinches. “You don’t have to reciprocate, but that’s a little rude, don’t you think? I know you’re mad at me and I get that, I really do, but I’m having kind of a vulnerable moment over here so if you could just not be a total dick about it, that would help me out a lot.”

“I need you to say that you meant what you said and that you’re not just, I don’t know, trying to make me feel better by playing up some middle school infatuation or something.”

“Fine. Fine. I guess it’s fair if you want to lord it over me a little. Yes, I absolutely meant it, and I feel like a complete idiot right now, but it doesn’t matter as long as you forgive me.”

“You _are_ a complete idiot, but you should—” Sirius bites the inside of her cheek, hard. She would have imagined James a lot more confident, and probably picked a venue other than the sweat-permeated air of the locker room, but a dream still seems more likely than this actually happening. When she doesn’t blink awake, miserable, in her bedroom, she braces herself. “You should. Not get over it.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Well, we’ve established you’re sort of dumb, so I can’t be sure, but I hope so.”

“Okay.” James runs a shaky hand through her hair. “Okay. Wow. This isn’t how I expected this to go—not that I’m not a total catch, mind you. But I’ll admit to being a little blindsided right now. I didn’t plan for this scenario.”

“Well, I’m no expert, but I think people typically kiss,” Sirius says, trying to sound more confident than she feels.

“I’m not kissing you for the first time in a locker room, what do you take me for? Besides.” James checks her watch. “In a minute or so, they’re going to come in here and make us head into the gym, which means you have forty-five seconds to duck out and find a good hiding spot. Although, if you stick around, I have it on good authority that we’re playing volleyball, and I promise to pick you first.”

“I hate volleyball, and you always pick me first.” Sirius rolls her eyes. “This isn’t going to make me play any harder, you know.”

“Well, that’s my dastardly plan foiled. You should get out of here before you get caught.”

“Right.” Sirius presses a fist to her mouth to fight the goofy smile she can’t quite help. “Right. Hey, this means you still owe me an embarrassing secret. Come up with something good.”

**Author's Note:**

> This didn't fit in the fic because I feel like Sirius can't distinguish between all the different pop songs James uses for ringtones, but the song that plays is "Hot N Cold," and it's set specifically for Twitter text notifications. James only has Sirius' tweets sent to her phone, so it's a kind of mean joke that goes completely over Sirius' head.


End file.
